A whimsical exploration of inspiration and creativity with the fibers that provide me with hours of contentment. Join me on this quilting, mixed-media and jewelry art journey!

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Paints & Gels & Textures, Oh My!

Hello, There! I've been playing with mixed-media on canvas for a class at The Stitchin' Post next spring. The canvas is 8" x 10" and the block is ~4" x 4". I used a variety of Golden Fluid acrylics, matte gel medium, light modeling paste, stamps, stencils, and cheesecloth. Some of the colors ended up being too bright, so I used good old Titan Buff acrylic to dull them down a bit and push them into the background. The block is foundation pieced.

My inspiration was an article in the paper describing how irregular English verbs have changed through time. Some scientists figured out that irregular verbs evolve at a constant rate over time -- the more infrequently used an irregular verb is, the more it is likely to be replaced by a regular form. The example used was the verb "help." The old past tense was "holp" (that's ugly!) which has been replaced by "helped". They figured out how long it would take certain verbs to change and that very high-frequency verbs like "to be" are likely to remain irregular forever...

I thought the article was interesting enough to clip and ended up using it as my background. I added more text using stamps and stencils and even wrote the alphabet in Sharpie marker (since I don't love my writing, that's mostly covered by paint and texture medium!). The twist block is done with a hand-dyed gradation to echo the evolution over time. It was a fun project.

2 comments:

what an interesting project I loved hearing the story of verbs...i wish I could remember all I was taught about using them. I just love the colours, design and textures you have achieved. Congratulations.

Good to hear from you, I enjoyed working on this one. I have a new "secret weapon": a few drops of titan buff will cover up colors that end up too bright or dark.

The fact that none of us can remember all those weird conjugations is exactly why the yucky ones change over time! I enjoyed the project until it was time to stitch through the canvas -- I kept hitting the stretcher bars! Take care, Kathy